1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus such as a copier or a microfilm printer capable of selectively forming an image of only a desired or necessary portion of an original such as a newspaper having various information in a mixed state, and more particularly to an image forming apparatus of the above-described type comprising an image-forming optical system for forming an electrostatic latent image of an image light by irradiating the image light reflected from an original to be scanned onto a photosensitive member, means for dividing a latent image forming area on the photosensitive member into a plurality of sectional blocks and designating a particular block from the plurality of blocks and image forming means for reproducing an image of the original corresponding to the sectional blocks except the designated blocks inside the designated specific area.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As the means for designating a particular sectional block when only a desired portion of the original document is to be copied, there is known for example a method of setting a two-dimensional coordinate corresponding to the document and inputting by means of, e.g. a ten key pod, coordinate values defining the particular area.
However, in the case of this method, the setting operation is very troublesome and there tends to occur errors in the operation. Thus, there is known another method in which a copiable area is divided into a plurality of sectional blocks and a user may determine for each block whether the same is to be copied or not.
According to this method however, although the area (block) to be copied may be set by a simple operation, each block has a predetermined size and therefore there occur inconveniences to be described next.
That is, if the predetermined size of the sectional block is large, it is impossible to carry out a fine edit operation. On the other hand, if the block size is predetermined to be small for carrying out a fine edit operation, section designating keys need be operated many times whereby the copy area setting operation becomes troublesome. Further, this block designating method is disadvantageous and inconvenient in that the area to be copied is not designed to correspond to various sizes of original documents.